Sorry for the novice question but I am trying to get to grips with RoR. I have a very basic sign up and login process in place but am having some difficulty getting the routing correct. I am also unsure whether I am actually being logged out successfully when I push my logout button because it isn't then displaying the login button as it should.

Those two things should get you going in the right direction. I also recommend that you check out the Railscasts episode about authentication from scratch. It gives a good overview of how to get started.

Thanks for your answer on this! I have been going through a few of these railcasts but find they often have small errors in that causes errors to be thrown up.

I managed to get :user_id to work in the end but having now added a :auth_token method instead to validate authentication through cookies, am struggling to get the same Login/Logout element to load correctly.